Exploration

Archive: 21 March 2003

This week on Netscape DevEdge is part one of a two-part interview with Mike Davidson of ESPN, who talks in depth about their curent redesign efforts. On the ESPN home page they’re currently using CSS positioning to lay everything out. That means they’ve dropped tables as a layout mechanism and, in the process, about 50KB of page weight. Mike has some very strong opinions, and I imagine they’ll be controversial in certain circles, but he speaks from the perspective of a designer in charge of a commercial site that serves close to a billion page views every month. His is a thoroughly practical point of view, and he’s not shy about it. I highly recommend it, and not just because I wrote the questions.

Through the O’Reilly Network, I came across a link to an English-language blog called
Where Is Raed?, written by a resident of Baghdad. This past Sunday, he posted a rant against war and for democracy that should be read by anyone who wants to get insight into how the events of the past year and decade are viewed by those who had to pay the price. A tiny exceprt:

how could “support democracy in Iraq” become to mean “bomb the hell out of Iraq”? why did it end up that democracy won’t happen unless we go thru war? Nobody minded an un-democratic Iraq for a very long time, now people have decided to bomb us to democracy? Well, thank you! how thoughtful.

Before you dismiss this as obvious propaganda, go read the piece in its entirety.

Note to those in the San Francisco area: I’ll be hanging out with some very cool people (like Doug and Tantek) at Rockin’ Java this Sunday at 2:00pm. All are welcome for discussion, open wifi, and caffeinated drinks. Be there or be, um, elsewhere.